Probing Uranus
“Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds… to boldly go where no man has gone before.” These are the words heard by millions of Tv viewers and Trekkies all over the global, but is the mission of the starship Enterprise possible? Can we truly go where no man has gone before and seek out new life or are we alone in the universe, doomed to explore something we alone inhabit? Most scientists believe it is possible and that earth isn’t the only planet with some form of life form on it. However there are still people who believe we are truly alone in the vastness of space. Which is true then, are a sole planet blessed with the miracle of life or just one of many with conditions for life. Also if these aliens are real, have they visited us already, taken us up in their ships to study a more primitive species in the galaxy.
Planet Earth, a small ball of rock 7,926 miles in diameter, that is 92.96 million million miles away from the star we call the sun. 71% of the earth is covered in water, filled with thousands of different organisms, the most advanced of which managed to evolve to live on the 29% of the earth made up of land. There are eight other planets that orbit our sun, yes eight, I grew up with pluto and I refuse to kill its dreams of being a planet. However out of these planets earth, is special because of one very important difference, life. What makes Earth so different in our solar system that it produced life? Well first is our atmosphere and what scientists call the Goldilocks principle. They compared our atmosphere with that of two other planets in our system. The first one being Mars, whose atmosphere is too thin fridge. The second is Venus, which has an atmosphere too heavy and hot to sustain life. That leaves earth’s atmosphere being just right, not to thin or heavy, and not too cool or too hot. Next on our checklist for a habitable planet are its elements. A planet needs liquid water, which as stated above we have plenty of, an energy source, and then what are called chemical building blocks like the oxygen we inhale and the carbon we exhale. Next on the list your planet needs a hot metallic core as well a rocky mantle.this solid inner core and liquid outer core play roles in protecting life from deadly solar radiation. Differences in temperature and composition in the two core regions emit Earth’s protective electromagnetic field. After that you need a moon, which may not seem necessary but ours keeps our climate stable by minimizing the tilt, which gives us our seasons. The Sun provides us energy and warmth but is far enough away that we aren’t too cold or too warm. And finally the list item on our list is actually our neighboring planets, Jupiter shields Earth from constant stellar bombardment. It’s estimated without our neighboring planets, the earth would be hit with 10,000 times as many asteroids. Put all these things together and you’re left with the spinning miracle we call Earth. But is our planet the only “miracle” or are there others.
After seeing what it is that makes Earth so special, the next thing that needs to be asked is, “are there other planets like Earth? As of June 2015, scientist have found eight planets they believe are suitable for sustaining life. All eight orbit a star and are within the comfort zone mentioned above, like Earth is. This means the temperature is right for water to be on the planet’s surface and also that the planet would be rocky similar to our own. The size of the planets are on the smaller size resembling that of Earth. The only thing that can not be determined is the exact surface temperature because that is largely determined by the composition of the planet’s atmosphere and the chemicals that make it up. One of these planets could host an alien life form who is observing us now or has even visited us for closer observation. But is that possible? Most people say it is, some even claim that we were visited back in 1947, when aliens crash landed in New Mexico.
July 7, 1947, 75 miles outside Roswell, New Mexico, a farmer discovers unknown debris outside his pasture. The U.S government released a statement saying the farmer discovered, a crashed weather balloon from the local Air Force Base. However many people, even today, believe that what the farmer discovered the remains of a crashed alien spacecraft observing our planet. Witnesses report seeing aliens after the crash, but the government claims these were dummies dropped from research balloons. Naomi Selff, a nurse seen leaving an autopsy room claimed she saw three horribly burnt bodies, with the worst odor she had ever smelled. The government told her she must be confusing the event with an aircraft accident where 11 crewmen were burned and killed, who were sent to the Roswell base hospital. The balloons were used in Project Moguel and made of strong ultra-lightweight, fiber-optic cable and fire proof material, which to the average person would be foreign and give the appearance of being not of this world. However, the dummies themselves weren’t dropped until the 50’s not in 1947 when the debris was discovered. The government claimed that the witnesses were consolidating the dummy drops of the 50’s with the actual discovery in 1947, meaning the witnesses were simply confused about details. This is the second time that the government blamed evidence on the witnesses confusing events. This fueled the Roswell conspiracy, with people claiming that the dummies were actually aliens the government was experimenting on. While the Project Moguel story was the easiest and accept reason for the debris it had some holes in it. Many people working on the base had no idea of the “balloons” and were worried they were Russian spy planes or satellites. While the projects “top secret” nature could explain the confusion, no one higher up was able to come in and clearly explain the whole situation. In 1994 the Pentagon released a report on the Roswell incident, which was made to debug the rumors of the knowledge of alien life, but this doesn’t stop people today from believing that a farmer in New Mexico was the first to discover alien life. But how does this incident affect the world today?
According to a poll done by the Huffington Post 48% of the United States believes that not only are there other lifeforms out there, but also that they are currently observing Earth at this very moment. Another 10% claimed that they have witnessed an alien space craft in our planet’s atmosphere. With more and more technological advances, as well as a better understanding of how the universe works it is becoming harder to deny the possibility of life on other planets and this poll reflects that. This belief now even extends to the vatican where Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, who is head of the Vatican Observatory Foundation says its only a matter of time before life on other planets is discover. Even his holiness Pope Francis is open to the idea, in a homily he gave in May 2014, the pope says that he would welcome aliens with open arms and even baptize them if he could. This shows how the acceptance of alien life even reaches up to influential leaders such as the Pope. Bill Nye “the science guy”, who on top of being a mechanical engineer is also CEO of the Planetary Society, predicts that we are a mere twenty years away from finding the alien life we are looking for. His opinion holds great weight in not only the scientific community, but also throughout the country, because many adults grew up learning science from him, and are more likely to believe a pop culture figure.
The other 52% polled by Huffington Post refuse the existence of aliens completely, for many different reasons. Most commonly people deny the existence of aliens for religious reasons, claiming that God made us and only us, and with 83% of people identifying as Christian, you can see why this idea is widely shared. Another reason is that any footage of “alien sightings” found are extremely blurry and not convincing. To further that point how come alien sightings aren’t caught on live Tv, only by single to small groups of isolated people. Some people even with this footage will refuse to believe in alien life until it is sitting in front of them and they can see and touch it. Others argue that if people have sighted aliens and even been abducted by them, then how come they haven’t made contact yet? Humans are arrogant in nature, this arrogance clouds people’s minds and gives them the idea that humans are the only intelligent life, simply because of how vastly superior we are. One famous scientist claims another reason people don’t believe is due to the media and how the similarly display alien life forms.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, a famous astrophysicist, stated in an article he wrote for NASA, that people’s inability to believe in alien life is linked to Hollywood’s lack of creativity. People have the endless possibilities only limited by their own imagination, yet time after in movies and other forms of entertainment we imagine aliens in very human state’s, two eyes, two legs, two arms, the only thing changing is their skin color, although green is always a favorite. A good example of this is the movie Avatar(2009), which featured large blue aliens that resembled humans very closely beside their size, blue skin, and some other small features. Avatar became the highest grossing movie of all times making of two billion dollars globally. Billions of people worldwide saw this movie and its vision on what aliens would look like. This puts a limit on what an average person sees as an alien and therefore, puts an alien more along the lines of a vampire or werewolf, that while not fully human, are still based off of a humanoid. By making aliens more like vampires, and to extent mythological, it’s harder for adults to take it serious, because then these alien sightings and stories seem more like tales made to scare kids than actual scientific pursuit. The first movie to ever feature aliens was A Trip to the Moon, released in 1902. In the movie astronauts travel to the moon and encounter aliens called Selenites. These Selenites were human in appearance, which could be because film was brand new and technology was brand new in the field of cinematography. Nevertheless, this was still the first example of humans limiting alien life to the image of man in modern forms of media. Tyson states that the movie business should look to movies like The Blob(1958), whose alien was a large “blob” of goo, who gets bigger as he consumes objects. This creativity shows just how varied aliens would be in appearance, because different planets will be composed of different chemicals giving the life forms varying evolutionary traits and features. For example Superman is an alien for the planet Krypton. His Kryptonian DNA gives him the power to absorb our “orange” sun’s energy giving him powers like flight and super strength. While the attention to Superman’s varied chemical structure is a great to show how aliens are different than us, he is still very much humanoid. This goes back to the arrogance of humans, we are so proud of our own strength and technology that it is hard to imagine a creature more powerful than ourselves and not make him in our own imagine. This could go back to God who made us in our image, so since we ourselves aren’t God we make our creations in our own human likeness, even those creations that aren’t human.
Another reason people have a hard time believing in alien existence is the reports of abductions that are seen on the news yearly. When most people think of an abduction, they think of a person from a small town in the middle of nowhere who was taken from their farm in the middle of the night and then experimented on in an all metal room room and dropped back where they were taken. Most of us are quick to call these people crazy or looking for attention, however some of these cases were solid enough to get the attention of the United Nations, as was the case in the 1960s with the Reed case. In Sheffield, Massachusetts Thomas and Matthew Reed were taken, in a flash of light, from their home and experiment on by nonhuman life. They would be taken several more times throughout the years, including one incident, where Thomas mother and grandmother were also taken on a public roadway. It is one of the few cases where evidence was collected by law enforcement. 40 people in the town report seeing flashing lights or an object in the sky the night of the incident. In 2010,Thomas underwent an advanced polygraph test regarding the incident and the results came back that he was being truthful. During the incident Thomas recalled a change in pressure, which coincides with spikes in magnetic readings and radiation in Sheffield during the time. Thomas sketched out what he witnessed and it currently hangs in the Roswell UFO museum.,
Humans are not the only things on our planet to be abducted by alien life. Since the 60s farm and other animals have been reported unnatural mutilated across the country. The animals were found totally drained of blood with no body fluid at the scene, this is important because if it was an attack then blood should be present at the site. The cuts found on the animals were surgical and appeared to be lasered, not torn by claws or bites. Each animal was found with similar organs missing including: the lips, eyes, anal and vaginal areas, jaw, and in the case of cows the udders. The bones had no cuts on them that would be present if a knife or similar instrument was used. In most cases a predator attack was ruled out because there was no sign of an animal eating the dead carcass. Most news and police reports attributed the dead animals either to predator attacks or cult groups performing rituals. While many instances of both animal and human abductions can be solved with logical reasons, the fact remains that incidents like the Reed abductions are still unsolved today and more reports come in with similar cases across the globe.
Whether they are far off on some distant planet or up in our atmosphere looking down at us, one thing is for sure, with the advancement of human technology as well as a better understanding of how the universe works, it is getting harder and harder to deny the idea of life somewhere out there. Life that will come in all shapes and sizes, with more than four limbs and two eyes, that breathes different than us, if they breathe at all. No longer will the image of a ‘little green man” pop into your head when you think of aliens, but of something of a different form. Will it be in the next 20 years, Bill Nye predicted, or in 100 years when our technology final allows it to be? No one can say for sure but I have a feeling the answer is quickly approaching.
References
“48% Of Americans Believe UFOs Could Be ET Visitations.” The Huffington Post, 32:59 400AD. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/11/48-percent-of-americans-believe-in-ufos_n_3900669.html.
“Bill Nye the Science Guy Says We Can Find Alien Life within 20 Years, but We’re Looking in the Wrong Place.” Techly, September 1, 2014. http://www.techly.com.au/2014/09/01/bill-nye-science-guy-says-might-cost-one-cup-coffee-find-aliens/.
“What Is It about Earth That Makes It Just Right for Life?” HowStuffWorks, August 16, 2010. http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/evolution/earth-just-right-for-life.htm.
Administrator, NASA. “Search for Life in the Universe I :: Astrobiology Magazine :: Search for Life in the Universe.” NASA, April 7, 2015. http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/starsgalaxies/search_life_I.html.